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326 pages, Paperback
First published September 7, 2006
I do not believe that anyone can be reproached for making use of such speculations, so long as they are careful not to place too much value upon them. —Contributions to the Psychology of Erotic Life, The Virginity Taboo
In addition, it is [this author’s] devout wish that this book may rapidly age, while that which was once new in it finds general acceptance, and its inadequacies are replaced by something more correct. —Three Essays on Sexual Theory, Preface to the Second Edition
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In almost every case the man almost feels restricted in his sexual activity by respect for the woman, and only develops his full potency if he has a debased sexual object before him. This in turn is partly explained by the fact that his sexual goals include perverse components, which he does not dare satisfy with the woman he respects. He can only have complete sexual pleasure if he is able to abandon himself unreservedly to satisfaction and he does not dare do this with his lawful wife. Hence his need for a debased sexual object, a woman who is ethically inferior to himself, to whom, he does not have to ascribe aesthetic considerations, who does not know him, who is not able to judge him with reference to the other circumstances of his life. He is happy devoting his sexual power to such a woman, even if all of his affection belongs to a superior woman.
. . .
It is rather unpleasant to say so, and it is also paradoxical, but nevertheless is must be said: in order to feel truly free in one’s erotic life and, thus also happy, one must overcome respect for the woman, and become familiar with the idea of incest with one’s mother or sister. Anyone who subjects himself to serious self-examination in regard to this demand will doubtless find within himself that he considers the sexual act as basically something debasing, something that stains and sullies, not only in the physical sense. —Contributions to the Psychology of Erotic Life, II - Concerning the Most Universal Debasement in the Erotic Life
Everyone knows that Freud changed everything. Freud changed everything by making everything about sex. Like the serpent urging the apple on Eve, Sigmund Freud brought sex to a world until then innocent, Edenic. When Freud published his theories, the era into which he wrote, having convinced itself puiblically at least of its own piety, could now publicly declare itself scandalised, incapable ever after of unlearning what freud had taught. Just as Eve’s apple, fruit of the tree of knowledge, yoked sex and knowledge irrevocably. Freud’s theories plunged everyone into a lamentable, seemingly inescapable state of knowing. Or so (not just) popular wisdom has it. —Jeri Johnson, Introduction
We grisly old Sykos who have done our unsmiling but on ‘Alices, when they were yung and easily freudened, in the penumbra of the procuring room . . . could (did we care to sell our feebought silence in camera) tell . . . that father in such virgated contexts is not always that undemonstrative relative . . . who settles our hashbill for us . . . and . . . what a neurasthene nympholept . . . with a prepossessing drauma present in her past and a priapic urge for congress with agnates before cognates fundamentally is feeling for under her lubricitous meiosis when she refers with liking to some feeler she fancie's face. And Mm. We could. Yet what need to say? ’Tis as human a little story as paper could well carry, in affect.